{"product_id":"paris-undercover-isbn-9780593358948","title":"Paris Undercover","description":"\u003cb\u003eTwo women in Nazi-occupied Paris created a daring escape line that rescued dozens of Allied servicemen. With one still in a German prison camp, the other wrote a book about it—a memoir built on fabrications. Now the bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eEighty Days\u003c\/i\u003e shares their incredible, never-before-told full story.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e“Goodman’s gripping account chronicles the events—both courageous and horrifying—and illustrates how loyalty and betrayal can coincide in wartime and its aftermath.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e“A heart-pounding tale that is impossible to put down.”—Lynne Olson, author of \u003ci\u003eMadame Fourcade's Secret War\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLONGLISTED FOR THE AMERICAN LIBRARY IN PARIS BOOK AWARD • A \u003ci\u003eWASHINGTON POST\u003c\/i\u003e BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEtta Shiber and Kate Bonnefous are the unlikeliest of heroines: two seemingly ordinary women, an American widow and an English divorcée, living quietly together in Paris. Yet during the Nazi occupation, these two friends find themselves unexpectedly plunged into the whirlwind of history. With the help of a French country priest and others, they set out to rescue British and French soldiers trapped behind enemy lines—some of whom they daringly smuggle through Nazi checkpoints hidden inside the trunk of their car. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUltimately the Gestapo captures them both. After eighteen months in prison, Etta is returned to the United States in a prisoner exchange. Back home, hoping to bring attention to her friend Kitty’s bravery, she publishes a memoir about their work. \u003ci\u003eParis-Underground\u003c\/i\u003e becomes a publishing sensation and Etta a celebrity. Meanwhile Kate spends the rest of the war in a Nazi prison, entirely unaware of the book that has been written about her—and the deeds that have been claimed in her name. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn researching this story, Matthew Goodman uncovered military records and personal testimonies that reveal, for the first time, the shocking truth behind Etta’s memoir and the unexpected, far-reaching consequences of its publication. More than just a story of two women’s remarkable courage, \u003ci\u003eParis Undercover\u003c\/i\u003e is a vivid, gripping account of deceit, betrayal, and personal redemption.“Goodman’s gripping account chronicles the events—both courageous and horrifying—and illustrates how loyalty and betrayal can coincide in wartime and its aftermath.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e, “10 Noteworthy Book for February”\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Two women who took on the Nazis . . . Genuine heroism and well told, with no Hollywood ending.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Of the countless books written about the French Resistance, \u003ci\u003eParis Undercover\u003c\/i\u003e stands out as a true original: a riveting, masterfully researched exposé of the explosive reality behind the story of two women imprisoned by the Nazis . . . a heart-pounding tale of betrayal that is impossible to put down.”\u003cb\u003e—Lynne Olson, author of\u003ci\u003e Madame Fourcade’s Secret War \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eEmpress of the Nile\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“With elegant language and his trademark meticulous research, Matthew Goodman peels back the layers of mythmaking to reveal a riveting true story that reads like a movie script and showcases the power of humans to persist in the face of overwhelming odds.” \u003cb\u003e—Elizabeth Letts, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Perfect Horse\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A smart, vividly realized account of a daring wartime escapade that turns out to be far more complex and problematic than it first appears, \u003ci\u003eParis Undercover\u003c\/i\u003e is a gripping and provocative feat of historical investigation—full of surprises to the very end.”\u003cb\u003e—Gary Krist, author of \u003ci\u003eEmpire of Sin\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Mirage Factory\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A genuine surprise: not a typical World War II history but a thoughtful examination of the sometimes-blurred lines between fact and fiction, and the dangers of telling other people’s stories.”\u003cb\u003e—Melanie Benjamin, \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eMistress of the Ritz \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eCalifornia Golden\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Just when it seems there is nothing more to learn about World War II, here comes this vivid story of an intrepid woman and her escape line, made more fascinating and poignant by its tangled afterlife.”\u003cb\u003e—Caroline Moorehead, author of \u003ci\u003eVillage of Secrets \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eMussolini’s Daughter\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A remarkable tale of a pair of unlikely middle-aged resisters . . . This is a fascinating book enlivened by exquisite detail and a deep sense of the humanity of its principal characters.” \u003cb\u003e—Tim Brady, author of \u003ci\u003eThree Ordinary Girls\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This is an amazing story. It’s so surprising and poignant to discover how these two middle-aged women, acting on their own, risked their lives to save Allied soldiers trapped in occupied France. And the consequences of their heroism turn out to be even more extraordinary: dear friends enmeshed in a story of desperate survival—and betrayal.”\u003cb\u003e—Sarah Rose, author of \u003ci\u003eD-Day Girls\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eMatthew Goodman\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of four previous books of nonfiction. His book \u003ci\u003eEighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World\u003c\/i\u003e was a national bestseller and has been translated into eight languages. His most recent book, \u003ci\u003eThe City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team\u003c\/i\u003e, received the New York City Book Award and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. His writing has appeared in the \u003ci\u003eWall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eUSA Today\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe American Scholar\u003c\/i\u003e, and numerous other publications.\u003cb\u003e1\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor so long Etta Shiber had lived the most circumscribed of lives: Until the age of fifty-­nine she had lived in four apartments, none of them outside a radius of sixteen streets and three avenues on the Upper East Side of New York. She had married William Noyes Shiber, manager of the telegraph department for Wil­liam Randolph Hearst’s New York newspapers, in 1901, when she was twenty-­three; she stopped teaching kindergarten three years later and didn’t hold a paying job ever again. She had never learned to drive, had never registered to vote, had never appeared in the pages of a newspaper. Most days she cooked and kept house, did her marketing among the bakeries and fruit stands and German butcher shops around the neighborhood; almost nightly she accompanied her cousin Irving Weil, one of New York’s most prominent music critics, to the symphony or the opera, or otherwise stayed home to knit and listen to the radio, or perhaps read a novel by Dickens or Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. “For almost thirty-­five years,” a reporter would later write, in some wonderment, “this quiet pattern comprised Mrs. Shiber’s daily existence.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHers was an exceedingly comfortable, predictable routine, one almost medicinal in its regularity—­for it was that very predictability, Etta found, that best held at bay her true constant companion: the nervousness that had afflicted her since she was a girl. Most of the time the feeling was like the low, persistent call of a fire alarm in the distance; it was always there, but she did what she could to ignore it and focus on whatever was in front of her. On other days, though, the bad ones, the alarm was close and loud in her ears, as if the fire were right outside her door, and she could feel herself growing hot and her heart quickened and sometimes, more worrisomely, it pounded out an irregular rhythm, and there was nothing she could do to concentrate on anything else and she had to lie down. By the time she was in her middle years Etta was suffering from hypertension, a condition that the doctors of the time still found maddeningly difficult to treat; she knew she should lose some weight, but she found that hard to do, which only increased her anxiety.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEtta had been prone to anxiety for as long as she could remember, had always been very shy, self-­conscious about her appearance, and almost reflexively self-­effacing; she recoiled at the notion of ever calling attention to herself. “One thing I have learned,” she once observed, “is not to be a fussmaker.” Early on she seems to have decided that the best path lay in being unfailingly polite and always following the rules—­at Grammar School No. 1 she won medals not only for scholarship but also for “deportment”—­and while she was a kind and sympathetic listener and was liked by everyone, she still found it painfully difficult to socialize with people she did not know well. At the Normal College of the City of New York, where like many smart young women of her time she studied to become a teacher, she did not belong to a single club or fraternity (as they were called, even though all of the students were female); she did not read Shakespeare and Swift with the Phoebean Literary Society, did not observe robins and warblers and wrens in Central Park with the Bird Club, nor sing with the Glee Club, nor help organize the annual “pink tea,” in which pink chrysanthemums were strewn over the top of each brewing pot—­which actually contained hot cocoa, as tea was considered too mature a drink for college girls.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the photograph of the graduating class of 1901, which shows several rows of young women in white shirtwaists and black velvet neck ribbons, their long hair swirled into pompadours in the “Gibson Girl” style of the time, Etta stands at the edge of the photo, ever so slightly apart from the rest of the group, like an island just off the mainland; in the\u003ci\u003e Normal College Echo \u003c\/i\u003efor 1901, the sole reference to her is the description provided by the yearbook staff: “Rather inclined to be good.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the yearbook, as in the college’s grading books, she is identified as “Henrietta” Kahn, a name that seems to have been a kind of way station on the path to Americanization; four years later, in 1905, she gave her name to census officials as Etta, and that is how she would be known for the rest of her life. Her parents had named her Jennett, after her father’s late mother Jeanette Lowe Kahn, in accordance with the Jewish tradition of naming children for deceased ancestors. The Kahns were immigrants from the Alsatian town of Eguisheim, where a Jewish community can be traced as far back as the early eighteenth century. Etta’s grandfather Benoit Kahn had arrived in New York in 1845, among the small percentage of Alsatian Jews who emigrated to a foreign country after they were granted the right of mobility; likely he sensed an opportunity in the United States, for he had been trained as an optician in Alsace and when he opened B. Kahn \u0026amp; Co. on lower Broadway in 1850, he was only the second optician in the city.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBenoit and Jeanette had two daughters and five sons, three of whom went into the family business, but only one of whom, the eldest, worked not as an optician but instead as a “traveling agent”—­that was Jacob Kahn, Etta’s father. Etta’s mother, Julia Roth, was herself the descendant of German Jewish immigrants, and though she had been born in New York she grew up speaking German as her first language. She gave birth to Etta on January 20, 1878, nine months to the day after her marriage to Jacob; three years later the couple had a son, Chester Arthur Kahn, born just six weeks after Chester A. Arthur, another New Yorker from the East Side, became president.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJacob died while Etta was still in school, leaving the family in straitened circumstances, and for many years afterward, Julia Roth Kahn took in boarders to help pay the rent. The Kahns lived on the top floor of a four-­story walk-­up apartment house on Lexington Avenue at Fifty-­fourth Street, above a funeral parlor and a French restaurant. The avenue was lined with buildings like that, four or five stories of stone or brick, simply corniced at the top, housing little shops or restaurants beneath cheerful awnings on the ground floor. Here and there, on more substantial corner lots, institutional buildings looked as if they had been dropped in from Europe: dark, austere churches from Germany and Sweden, synagogues in the Moorish style, a safe-­deposit bank with the crenellated towers of a medieval castle, Second Empire rounded mansard roofs adorning the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled. From the street came the constant whir and clop of horse carriages and the occasional clang of a trolley car; every few minutes the Third Avenue elevated train rumbled in the distance like thunder. Just up the avenue was the Normal College of the City of New York, a tuition-­free institution that provided most of the female teachers for the public schools of the city. Bookish and unmarried, without a father and with a younger brother still at home, and living only two trolley stops away, it was natural that Etta would attend the Normal College, and she applied and was accepted to enter in 1898.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEtta was still enrolled when she met and married William Noyes Shiber, who was living seven doors south of her on the very same block of Lexington Avenue. Born in Pennsylvania, Shiber had grown up in the small town of Olean in western New York, where his father made barrels for Standard Oil; as a young man he came to New York City and found a job as a Western Union operator before getting hired in the telegraph room of William Randolph Hearst’s New York newspapers, the \u003ci\u003eEvening Journal\u003c\/i\u003e and the \u003ci\u003eAmerican\u003c\/i\u003e. By 1896, at the age of twenty-­four, he had already become the manager of the telegraph room—­an exceedingly responsible position for someone so young, as telegrams were the chief means by which the paper’s employees communicated with far-­flung correspondents, not to mention with Hearst himself, who was generally three thousand miles away in California but who took a regular interest in the workings of all his newspapers and magazines. William Shiber was highly esteemed in the trade for his ability to oversee an efficient telegraphic service, but he was also understood to be honest and politically independent and he was trusted by labor and management alike. “Shiber is one grand fellow,” \u003ci\u003eThe Commercial Telegraphers’ Journal\u003c\/i\u003e once noted. “That’s why everybody on the Journal from W. R. Hearst on down is stuck on him.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor Etta Kahn, born and raised in an immigrant neighborhood in Manhattan, Bill Shiber must have seemed something like America itself: large and athletic, gregarious, outdoorsy (he was an avid rower and an enthusiastic nature photographer), and with a charmingly small-­town demeanor. He was also not Jewish; unconventionally for the time, Etta had married outside the faith. She had been raised in a family with little in the way of religious strictures (her brother Chester’s wife, Helen, was Catholic), and though Etta herself believed in God, she didn’t observe Jewish holidays nor keep kosher, and their wedding had been held not in a synagogue, nor for that matter in a church, but at the Society for Ethical Culture, which ran the progressive private school where Etta was then receiving her postgraduate training. No less a figure than Felix Adler himself had performed the ceremony.New York Times bestselling author of Eighty Days","brand":"Ballantine Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48532177715429,"sku":"NP9780593358948","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780593358948.jpg?v=1773182952","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/paris-undercover-isbn-9780593358948","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}